The story behind Souls of Mischief’s ‘93 ’til Infinity’
In the early 1990s, Los Angeles was the epicentre of West Coast hip-hop, and things were at a tipping point, where, by 1993, Dre and Eazy-E were feuding, a young rapper named Snoop Doggy Dogg was preparing to release his debut record Doggystyle, and 2Pac was going stratospheric.
Things were moving fast in LA, and that energy arguably fed into the sound being developed there, but a few hundred miles away, in Oakland, a different sort of Californian hip-hop was emerging, and it was decidedly more relaxed.
“Sometimes it gets a little hectic out there,” Tajai says at the beginning of Souls of Mischief’s legendary song ‘93 ’til Infinity’, “but right now, yo, we gonna up you on how we chill”. ‘93 ’til Infinity’ served almost as a direct response to the intensity of West Coast rap during that period. It dealt with many of the same subjects as other rap songs of the time, such as smoking weed and pursuing girls, but it was certainly more mellow in feel, and that was due, in large part, to producer and Souls of Mischief member A-Plus discovering a chilled-out record that he liked the sound of.
“Back then, we didn’t have any money,” A-Plus recalled to Spin in 2013, “So I didn’t have a whole bunch of money to buy records, but I did whenever I could. I found that particular record, it’s a Billy Cobham album called Crosswinds.”
This record was not, at the time, a very popular sampling commodity, so it was just lying there in the “dollar bin”. The fact it was so cheap made picking it up a no-brainer, so A-Plus coughed up the money and brought it home to play around with. This decision would literally change his life, although he obviously didn’t know it yet. He was just a kid playing around with music he liked the sound of, specifically a song from the album called ‘Heather.’
“I put it together really fast,” he remembered, “I didn’t even think it was a big deal, actually, until people were like, ‘Yo, that’s fucking dope’. It was just another beat”.
A-Plus had just been experimenting, and in doing so, he landed on something wonderful, but his creation still needed rappers to work their magic on it. “Compositionally,” explained his bandmate Phesto, “we wanted to include everybody… hip-hop music is so repetitive, it’s a loop. So in order to keep the ear interested, we were just like, ‘Well what if we just trade off, like rapidfire in that sense? And that way everybody gets to have equal time on the track’.”
At the time, trading bars in the way that the group does on the track was more unusual than it is today. This was actually very innovative, and it goes some way to explaining why the song has endured for so many decades now. The song is a hip-hop classic, and the relaxed, playful exchanges between the rappers is surely a key reason why.
“When I think about it, it’s almost like self-prophecy,” Phesto noted of the song’s legacy, “We said ‘93 ’til infinity’, and then the song is still here. Now you have people from younger generations who were born in ’93, and they’re like, ‘93 ’til infinity’. It means so many different things to so many different people.”